I Hate to Leave This Beautiful Place

by Howard Norman

  Engine-wise, the bookmobile had a lot of problems: stalled out at a corner, blue hood raised, radiator geysering steam, grind of metal and friction smell, fan belt broken, oil spilling out, things like that. “Just bus problems,” Pinnie Oler would call them, shrugging philosophically. Looking back, the word that I think accurately describes him is poised. He’d walk right up to a house, knock on the door, and when someone appeared, he’d point to the bookmobile and ask to use the telephone, and far more often than not it worked out. He would call his wife, Martha, who was a bus mechanic for the Grand Rapids school system. It must’ve been rare to have a woman mechanic back then. Maybe it still is. Martha would come to the rescue. She drove a green pickup truck with built-in toolboxes.

  To my mind, Martha Oler was an absolutely beautiful woman. I thought she looked savvy and confident. During my months as a bookmobile assistant, she had to be called out on at least half a dozen occasions. Each time, she’d climb down from the cab of her truck, walk over to her husband, lean him against the broken-down bookmobile, and in her smudged mechanic’s smock kiss him as deeply and passionately as people kissing in any movie I’d seen up to that point—right out in the open, daylight audience or no. I saw a lot through the bookmobile window. Then she’d return to the truck, get her tools, and attend to the bus problem. She was slightly taller than Pinnie, had dark red hair and a quick, lip-biting smile, and always leaned inside the bookmobile to say, “Hey, sport, fancy seeing you here!” That was her little joke, me being a fixture like I was.

  The bookmobile made eight official stops per day. Hillcrest Elementary, the public swimming pool, Mills Retirement Village, Blodgett Memorial Hospital, across from Dykstra’s Apothecary, Mulick Park Elementary School, Union High School, and the YMCA. But in the summer of 1964, Pinnie Oler also made, a minimum of twice a week, what he called an unscheduled stop. This was in front of his own house, at 58 Wycliffe Drive NE. The first time he made this unscheduled stop, he switched off the ignition and said, “There’s a park nearby. Take a Nehi orange or keep filling out overdue notices, whatever you want. Me and Martha are trying to make a baby.” He turned the roundabout handle to open the door, stepped out onto the street, went to the front of the bookmobile, and propped open the hood so it looked like the bus had broken down. “For appearance’ sake,” he said. His wasn’t a front door he had to knock on. Two Nehi orange sodas later—add to that sitting in the park reading a book about adventures in the far north of Canada, dangling my feet in a pond that was home to two aggressive swans to watch out for, and nodding off under an oak for a quick nap on a sultry afternoon—I went back to the bookmobile. There I found Pinnie Oler sitting in the driver’s seat, the motor idling. Martha was browsing the Science section. “Martha’s got the afternoon off,” he said. “She’s going to get some reading in.”

  It was about this time that I started to write letters to other people’s fathers. I wrote a lot of these letters in the bookmobile during lulls. I wrote them on the backs of overdue notices, upward of ten notices per letter.

  First I made a list of fathers. All told, there were twenty-two. I wrote to Jerry Boscher’s father, Marcia Eldersveld’s, Paul Bigelow’s, Shawnay Smith’s, Gary van Eerden’s, Becky Marcellus’s, Jay Osherow’s, Stephen Peck’s, Tommy Sturdevant’s, Esme Carlyle’s father (he was an elementary school principal), Ellen Hake’s, Brian Siplon’s, Sara Schoen’s, Genevieve T. Park’s, Eric Klein’s, Eileen Heuvelhorst’s, Darlene Diane Johnson’s, Bobby Fodor’s, Mandes Iver Garnes’s, Yvonne Muller’s, Nancy Wong’s, and Ira and Jay Dembinksky’s father.

  I never sent a single letter; in that sense, my epistolary life was willfully unrequited. But I didn’t throw them away, either. Plus, I made carbon copies. “A letter never sent is a kind of purgatory,” writes Chekhov. What made me write all those letters? The basic desire to speak to any father with a sense of intimacy, I suppose. Being able to organize emotions, the direct address, the implorations and requests, the letting off of steam, the indictments, the complaints, the attempt to feel things deeply. And since I was composing these letters on pieces of paper with the words Overdue Notice at the top, they must’ve been written with an abiding sense of urgency, not to mention some notion of imposing a penalty. No single example can fully represent this veritable fugue state of letter writing. But here’s one written to Mandez Garnes’s father, whose first name was Jacob.

  Dear Mr. Garnes,

  You probably remember that I’m friends with your son Mandez and that I’ve been at your house. You probably remember that at your barbeque Mandez and I took our chicken and potato salad over by the guest house. Mandez told me the guest house was going to become his own private room. It was going to be his birthday present when he turned sixteen. I work in the bookmobile and have some time to think about important things. One of these things is that last week you might remember seeing me in front of the Majestic Theatre. I wasn’t short on money for a ticket. I didn’t need to ask you for money because I work in the bookmobile, as I said. I don’t remember a lot of things my own father said but he called that kind of movie a shoot ’em up. Why I’m writing this letter is for the following reason. I want to tell you that I thought it was wrong of you to embarrass Mandez when he found out he was short of ticket money himself. You said it builds character to earn your own money and why should you pay for Mandez, he’s already fifteen. My own father embarrasses me every day by not being around. Mandez is lucky you’re around but you didn’t have any cause to embarrass Mandez that way, I think. You could just as easily of given him the ticket money and talked to him father son in private later on. That’s all of it. By the way something you should know is that Mandez is good at earning money. For instance there’s nobody better than your son at finding money people dropped under the bleachers at Ottawa Hills stadium, during football games. Maybe you didn’t know that every Saturday and Sunday morning Mandez walks around under the bleachers and finds money like that. Were you ever that smart when you were 15? Maybe you should give that some thought. I don’t think Mandez enjoyed the movie very much because of all of what you did.

  With sincerity,

  I stopped writing these letters when school started again, but by then my archive contained two hundred, give or take. I’d purchased two manila envelopes, placed the originals in one, the carbons in another. I stuffed both in the bottom drawer of a metal cabinet in the basement of our house, a drawer otherwise crammed with Belfaire Jewish Orphan Home newsletters from the 1930s.

  On July 5—I remember the date because I watched Peter Dykstra take down from the apothecary window an American flag he’d displayed on Independence Day—Robert Boxer brought his grandmother to the bookmobile. She had just been in the apothecary with my father, her grandson Robert, and her son-in-law Peter Dykstra. I saw my father step outside, walk down the street, and stand by the bus stop about a block away. Mrs. Boxer was quite large, about sixty-five years of age, I’d guess, and confined to a wheelchair, so Robert had to carry her up the three steps. He was strong, but it definitely took some effort. At the landing, she said, “Now, see, Robert, aren’t you glad I don’t eat those Snickers bars like I used to?” Robert started laughing so hard he almost dropped his grandmother, but he kept his balance, navigated to a bench, and set his grandmother down on it. He sat next to her, catching his breath. “My grandmother’s doing deliveries with me today,” Robert said to me and Pinnie Oler.

  “I’m keeping on my church hat,” she said. “It’s good for these hot sunny days and I am easily flushed. And if my blood heats up too much, well, my grandson Robert can tell you, I have been known to faint.”

  “You’re strong as a horse, Grandma,” Robert said. “I don’t know why you present yourself this way all the time. I’ve never seen you faint.”

  “Heat stroke, it’s called,” Mrs. Boxer said. “And the only reason, Robert, you have not seen me faint from it is because you never happen to be there.”

  “My loving pharmacist father says you’re generall
y in very good health,” Robert said.

  “My own mother lived to be one hundred and two,” she said.

  “I’ve heard that rumor,” Robert said. “I’ve heard that rumor a thousand times.”

  Naturally, Pinnie offered Mrs. Boxer a Nehi orange, which she accepted. Mrs. Boxer, Pinnie, Robert, and I were all drinking Nehi orange. “This bookmobile’s a regular speakeasy,” she said, but I didn’t know what a speakeasy was. Once she got settled with her drink, Mrs. Boxer started in on “the man who’s always at the counter.” I quickly realized she was referring to my father, though she didn’t know the man was my father; nobody knew he was my father except for me. “Every time our church’s station wagon delivers me to visit Robert at work, that man’s there. Well, maybe not every time, but almost. Yes, sir, just about every time. I don’t know, there’s something uncomfortable about him. O vale of sorrows, O Lord in heaven, forgive me for speaking with suspiciousness toward a man living or dead, but this man—he’s a snake charmer. Yes, sir, he could charm a snake.”

  I was feeling humiliated at this point. I started to page through a book of photographs of polar bears and Eskimos and stark landscapes.

  “That’s not how you raised me to talk,” Robert said. “You’re becoming what you say you didn’t like about your own mother in Alabama, Grandma. An old back-porch gossip. Larry’s never been anything but friendly to me. He’s got a name, by the way. Larry.”

  Pinnie adjusted the dashboard fan so Mrs. Boxer could benefit more from it.

  “Larry might be unemployed,” Pinnie said. “Just because he dresses like a toothbrush salesman doesn’t mean he’s employed selling toothbrushes.” Truth was, I had no idea what my father did for a living. Maybe he did sell toothbrushes.

  “That’s also true,” Mrs. Boxer said. “It’s my son-in-law I’m worried about, though. Peter’s a good man, but he shouldn’t agree with all this man’s opinions—is my opinion.”

  “He’s got opinions. He’s got opinions. And some are excitable. But Larry speaks like a very well-educated man, Grandma,” Robert said. “Okay, he’s maybe uncomfortable, like you say. However you mean that.”

  “I’ve never once heard him say anything personal about his life,” Mrs. Boxer said. “Such as, does he have a wife, does he have a family? Nothing.”

  “Well,” Pinnie said, “if he doesn’t have a wife and family, he’s not going to mention them, is he?”

  There was agreement on this sentiment all around. Everyone drank their Nehi oranges in silence. Then Mrs. Boxer looked at me and said, “Did you ever meet this Larry? Come to think of it, Howard, I’ve never seen you inside the apothecary, come to think of it. You’re either in this bookmobile or you’re standing next to this bookmobile.”

  “I’ve seen him through the window,” I said.

  “Not quite the same thing as being in a room with somebody, Lord knows,” Mrs. Boxer said.

  “Maybe he’s got no other daytime place to go,” Pinnie said. “It’s a free country, as long as he pays for his coffee.”

  The conversation moved on.

  During a mid-July stop in front of Union High School, a man returned a book on interlibrary loan, North American Indian Waterfowl Traps, Weirs, and Snares. At such moments, the basic transaction of borrowing or returning, I would often attempt to be a student of people. I’d scrutinize a face, size up a person, make a private assessment, indulge in speculation as to what sort would be interested in this or that particular book. I’d even speculate about which room a person read in at home—kitchen, living room, bedroom, screened-in porch—and other sorts of domestic tableaux, attempting to think narratively, to put each person at the center of the story of his or her life.

  One day Pinnie caught me exhibiting a severe frown, part of an overall expression of doubt toward a borrower, a woman who was teaching a summer course at Union High. Soon after this teacher left the bookmobile, he said, “That look you get on your face, it isn’t exactly welcoming. It doesn’t fit the etiquette of my bookmobile. You squint like you’re trying to hypnotize somebody. You should see yourself. Goodness sake, the person’s just returning a book. You make it like you want to sit them down in an empty room at the police station. You know, bare light bulb overhead. ‘Sir—ma’am—why’d you choose that particular book, anyway?’ Like every day’s an episode of Dragnet. Try and stop doing that, okay?”

  That evening, without officially noting on an interlibrary loan form that it had been punctually returned to the bookmobile, I slipped North American Indian Waterfowl Traps, Weirs, and Snares into my weather-beaten knapsack, in there with the tangerine peels from my lunch. I didn’t want to wait for the book to go through channels before I could study it. I stopped to sit on a park bench on my way home. After a quick perusal of some of the illustrations, I was hooked. I immediately felt the excitement of trying, as soon as possible, to apply ancient, “well-traveled” techniques of capturing ducks—maybe even a swan—to my almost nightly visits to Reeds Lake in Ramona Park. Reeds Lake was my secret haunt that summer.

  While I wasn’t legally sanctioned to drive until I was sixteen, truth be told I drove a car nearly every night. I’d been anxious to drive. (In the bookmobile I’d read enough of On the Road by Jack Kerouac to grasp its hipster restlessness as a possibility for me, say, a year or two down the line. What’s more, I’d secretly put Maynard G. Krebs, the stereotypical beatnik character on The Many Loves of Dobie Gillis, with his goatee, his unkempt clothes, and laid-back cool, in the same light. Kerouac and Krebs were my earliest icons of an independent life.) In fact, I’d already purchased a beat-to-crap 1960 Ford, whose grille had been stove in by a pickup truck and never repaired. I didn’t care. That car represented my future, sitting day and night in my driveway. It had cost $200. Paris Keller helped me out there. I had only mentioned my desire to own it and she loaned me $150. She even went to East Grand Rapids to take it for a test drive, telling the owner she herself was interested in buying it. I suppose that had some truth to it, since she was the one who signed the bill of sale, and, the next day, she transferred the title over to my name. I had no idea how to thank her.

  As often as seven nights a week, I’d wait until my mother was asleep, the radio always on next to her bed (my mother was ever on the alert for tornado warnings; we had a tornado shelter, with a basement entry, stocked with cans of Campbell’s soup and two bottles of whiskey, and some nights my mother slept down there), then I’d drive the thirty or so blocks to Reeds Lake.

  I had practically memorized the driver’s test manual and was careful to stay below the speed limit, hands at ten o’clock and two o’clock on the wheel, navigating the streets to the wealthy section of town. Some people had lakefront houses with wraparound porches and cabin cruisers moored in boat garages. One reason I went to the lake was to swim near the faux Mississippi paddle-wheel steamer, which, a decade earlier, had been the feature attraction of a popular amusement park, but now it was in shabby disrepair, in dry-dock on scaffolding, propped up a few feet out of the water, so on a windy day waves lapped at its hull. Most people I knew preferred to swim at public swimming pools, the more adventuresome ones in the Thornapple River.

  On an exceedingly hot day during the last weeks of school the previous year, my best friend, Paul Amundson, and I played hooky, walked about three miles to the Thornapple, stripped down, and prepared to go for a swim in the shallows, mostly shrouded by enormous oak and willow trees, on a beautiful stretch of the river. When we stepped out from behind an oak, we heard laughter and playful shouting. We immediately got dressed and investigated, and to our astonishment discovered our English teacher, Kathy Woods, skinnydipping with her fiancé, whom she’d introduced to our after-school creative writing club. “Class,” she’d said, “I’d like you to meet my fiancé, Mr. Williams. He’s a policeman. But he’s extra-special and different, because he writes for newspapers, and he’s writing his own poetry, too. Don’t be afraid to ask questions just because a real writer is visiting, okay?


  Behind the tree, Paul became a little panicky. “We have two choices. We can stay and watch, or we can get out of here fast.” I voted for staying. Paul said, “But what if I see something I can’t forget? What’ll I do then?” I could only come up with, “Just remember as much as you can for the rest of your life.” Paul started to walk away. He didn’t look back; I looked back, then ran and caught up with my friend. “What I think’s best,” Paul said, “is to give people their privacy.” I thought it was the most adult, dignified thing I’d ever heard.

  The following Monday, an “exercise in description” was due in Miss Woods’s English class. I worked on mine for hours over the weekend, typing version after version on the Olivetti. On Tuesday before English class, the last period of the day, Miss Woods asked for a private conference. So I stayed after, and she said, “I want to speak with you about your three pages of description. First, let me point out that I only asked for two pages. You got a little carried away. That meant I had to read more of your writing than anyone else’s. But okay. All right. That’s not a crime, is it?

  “The assignment was to provide a description of anything you wanted and to give what you write a lot of thought. And I think your writing is excellent. But I took note of a few things. Let me see here . . . Oh, yes, here on page two. Where you write how this teacher and this policeman—let me quote you—‘entwined their clothes in knots before they jumped into the river.’ Let’s examine this sentence. You really don’t need the word entwined to describe knots, do you? Knots are by definition entwined, aren’t they? Now, I won’t tell the principal you were skipping school. That would be hypocritical of me. Fine, then. Now that we have an understanding, I’ll trust you to keep my truancy to yourself—and I’ll do the same for you. Both of us will have to live with the fact that we skipped school on an unbearably hot day and ended up at the same swimming hole. Funny how life is. All right, you’re free to go now. By the way, I haven’t breathed a word about this to my fiancé. You remember he’s a policeman, right?”